ART HISTORY FESTIVAL 2023 – Scotland

An exploration of paintings that revolutionised British art with their radical colour theory and bold application. This tour, led by Curator of British Art Dr Jo Meacock, will encompass aesthetes like James McNeill Whistler and Albert Moore, Pre-Raphaelites D. G. Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, Glasgow Boy E. A. Hornel, Scottish Colourist F. C. B. Cadell, 20th-century greats Joan Eardley and Frank Auerbach and contemporary Glasgow artist and musician Victoria Morton. For each colour was a means to express their unique ideas and perception of the world, their works often shocking their contemporaries with their bold conception.

Colour is important at sea, whether a ship needs to be recognised, wants to send a message or is trying to move secretly in wartime. Find out more on this tour looking in detail at some of Glasgow Museums’ ship model collection with Transport and Technology Curator Emily Malcolm.

Join Dr Ralph Moffat, Glasgow Museums’ Curator of European Arms and Armour, for an exploration of the colourful (and sometimes gruesome) imagery of the Middle Ages. The talk will encompass arms and armour and artworks in the Burrell Collection.

There is often a perception of the past as being a grey and monochrome place, devoid of colour and light. This is particularly true of the Middle Ages. However, interiors were not unadorned and grey, draughty halls were not sparingly lit to reveal bare stone walls and drab lifeless furnishings. The truth is that the medieval world was awash with colour and people took great delight in the bold use of rich paints, dyes, stained glass, enamels and textiles. The Burrell Collection is home to a wealth of medieval treasures that showcase the reality of a vibrant and colourful past. This presentation by Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Art, Ed Johnson, will explore the abundance of colour in medieval Europe, its use and symbolic importance in both religious and secular spaces.

Curator tour of Repeat Patterns, an exhibition of work commissioned from Glasgow-based artists Helen de Main and Mandy McIntosh. The exhibition emerged from research and conversations about feminism and social reproduction – how inequalities persist through generations – addressed through radical printmaking practices. This tour will focus on both artists’ use of colour in their work which references their source materials but is also used to focus and inspire visitor engagement.

Complementing the ‘Cinema City’ display at the Riverside Museum, this talk by Transport and Technology Curator Neil Johnson-Symington will showcase the various artforms linked to Glasgow’s ‘picture palaces’ from Glasgow Museums’ collections: featuring everything from hand-painted posters to architectural drawings, as well as decorative stained glass and cinema programmes. Work by artists, including Joan Eardley, Andrew Hay and Douglas Gordon, for whom the cinema has been an inspiration, will also feature.

The Chinese word for ‘colour’ involves a character 色 se meaning ‘emotion’, often referring to ‘desire’. Daoist principles recognise five elements which correspond to colours. These are metal (white); earth (yellow); fire (red); wood (blue); water (black). This tour by Curator of Chinese Art, Dr Yupin Chung, will explore the inspiration behind the Burrell Collection’s new Colour Gallery and the meaning of colours in Chinese ceramics.

How did potters feel about nature?

How was their intense use of a single glaze colour a way of expressing their feelings?

What were the connections between the craft and design worlds?

Tour of new ‘Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary’ exhibition by Learning and Access Curator Jen Keenan. We will explore the social context that Mary Quant emerged in during the 1950s, and how this influenced her unique and innovate approach to design.

This is a free in-person tour, limited to 10 places. Spaces are on a first come, first served basis. Meet at the ticket desk in the basement 5 minutes prior to the tour start time to secure your space. 

The colour palette people now most associate with the Glasgow Style – the UK’s only stylistic response to Art Nouveau – is one of delicate pastels of pink, green and mauve, all favoured at its zenith in the early 1900s. However, the colours favoured by each designer associated with the Style evolved alongside their personal stylistic development and visual and intellectual explorations. Colours could be picked for symbolic reference, to create specific effects, emotional responses, or even for political messaging. Applied colour would often take the form of material inlays providing punctuation points of saturated intensity, texture or sheen.

Join Alison Brown, Curator of European Decorative Art 1800 to present on a tour of the Mackintosh and Glasgow Style collections and learn about the artistic movement’s journey in colour from the early dark, acid-toned palettes of the mid-1890s to the lighter, brighter, vibrant tones of the 1910s and early 1920s.

Cassoni are elaborately painted chests produced in Italy from the fourteenth to sixteenth century as wedding gifts commissioned either in pairs for the bride and groom respectively or by the groom to hold his bride’s dowry. In Florence, a centre of production for these objects, the front and sides of the chest were often colourful figurative panel paintings depicting mythological or chivalrous scenes. These stories provide an interesting insight into the Italian Renaissance concept of marital love, gendered virtues and social status, as well as the increasingly sophisticated intellectual world of wealthy Italians during this period. The Burrell Collection’s Judgement of Paris, painted in the mid-fifteenth century, was once part of a cassone. Subject to scholarly debate for over a century, this painting is associated with other panel paintings, revealing more of the narrative of the original cassone, but also innovations in style which make this piece internationally significant.

Dr Samuel Gallacher is Keeper of The Burrell Collection, Glasgow and former Assistant Director of the Medici Archive Project, Florence. His PhD focused on the collection, patronage, exchange, and display of art objects at the Medici court in the sixteenth century.

Of the many objects in the Burrell Collection that depict water on them, four Islamic Persian objects show four novel approaches to illustrating water as experienced in nature. These objects – two ceramic vessels from the 13th and 14th centuries, and two pile carpets from the 17th century – come from different parts of Iran, from Kirman in the south, from the Kurdish region in the west, and from Kashan in the centre. 

In this gallery talk, Noorah Al-Gailani, the Curator of Islamic Civilisations, will explore these objects and the imaginative ways in which their designers chose to depict water. 

To coincide with the publication of 5b’s new monograph on painter Carole Gibbons, artist Lucy Stein will speak about Gibbons’ work and her influence on later generations of artists.

As part of our ‘Collecting Stories’ project with our young people’s collective, this session will look at the importance of colour in the Pier Arts Centre’s permanent collection of 20 & 21 century British modernist art and the role that it plays in influencing our future collecting. The session will also include discussion on a new exhibition at the Centre, of work by Brandon Logan, whose artwork ‘Salt Pig’ (2020), was recently added to the collection. The Pier Arts Centre collection played a significant part in his formative years and as a young artist with a growing reputation nationally, colour is at the foundation of his practice.

Creativity and Curiosity is an international art-science project led by visual artists Ione Parkin and Gillian McFarland, working in connection with astrophysicists, cosmologists and planetary scientists. The artists share insights into the artwork created in response to the rich imagery of space, exploring the nature of interdisciplinarity within the practice of visual thinking.

Ione Parkin is a Royal West of England Academician and Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester. 

Gillian McFarland is a Scottish Society of Artists member, experienced creative collaborator and Art Therapist within NHS practices.

Join director of Stills Ben Harman for a free guided tour of their current show, the first exhibition in Scotland dedicated to the work of Prague-born, Uk-based photographer, Markéta Luskačovà. Harman will share insights into the photographs, focusing on Luskačovà’s lifelong interest in children and childhood, how they fit into Luskačovà’s wider practice and their historical significance.